Raytheon’s Silent Guardian

When turned on, it emits an invisible, focused beam of radiation – similar to the microwaves in a domestic cooker – that are tuned to a precise frequency to stimulate human nerve endings.

It can throw a wave of agony nearly half a mile.

Because the beam penetrates skin only to a depth of 1/64th of an inch, it cannot, says Raytheon, cause visible, permanent injury.

The scary thing for me is how this would enable some pretty grisly torture scenarios. Think about it: you can only take torture so far before you start permanently injuring someone or kill them, which renders the point of torture moot — dead men don’t tell tales.

But imagine putting someone in a room with this device, turning it on, and then going away for a day or two. What would happen? It can’t kill them, but it would expose them to non-stop, excruciating pain.

Would they die of cardiac arrest? I would have to think that there would be some brutal and potential lethal secondary effect. Can pain kill you?

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Comments

I think that Raytheon’s claims are probably based on the same flawed assumptions that most electromagnetic field safety guidelines are based on: that if it’s not intense enough to raise the temperature of the tissues that it’s penetrating, it’s not doing any damage. There are credible / plausible minority opinions to the contrary, some of which say that exposures at one-hundredth or less of those levels has impacts at the level of protein synthesis / folding and gene expression. If true, then we should have some concerns about what constitutes an acceptable level of EMF in our everyday environment, much less what directed energy weapons might do to a person.

My guess? Most people won’t have any overt problems from a single exposure to this weapon in the field, but a minority of unfortunates will experience peripheral neuropathies and other chronic conditions that may develop over time in such a way that no one will connect the dots.

As for sustained exposure for a couple of days, even if it didn’t drive a person insane, I think it would do permanent physical damage or at least cause permanent agony due to neurological “kindling”.

We know that long-term depression causes fairly permanent shifts in brain chemistry and structure. My hypothesis is that long-term, continuous pain would flood the body with various biochemical responses, which would, in turn, cause physical problems.

Maybe the lawyers who drafted the torture memos would be willing to act as test subjects. As the joke goes, why did scientists start using lawyers rather than rats in their experiments? Because they found themselves getting emotionally attached to the rats – and because there are some things a rat just won’t do.

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